Always on the lookout for "sock puppets," "POV pushers" and other industry no-nos, Jim Heaphy of American Canyon is among a limited number of Wikipedia editors in the area, he said. It's a "satisfying" avocation he shares with his wife, Debra.

Wikipedia editors have a lexicon all their own within which those words mean something. (See accompanying glossary.)

"As far as I know, I'm the most active (Wikipedia) editor in Napa County, the 62-year-old Detroit native said.

Married 33 years, the Heaphys, who have lived in American Canyon since July 2009, are the parents of two grown sons. Wikipedia "is a collaboratively edited, multilingual, free-access, free content Internet encyclopedia, that is supported and hosted by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation," according to Wikipedia's website. "Volunteers worldwide collaboratively write Wikipedia's 30 million articles in 287 languages, including more than 4.5 million in the English Wikipedia."

Anyone with access to the site can edit almost any article, giving it the Internet's "largest and most popular general reference work," the site notes.

Jim Heaphy said he first got involved editing the online reference work when he noticed a need for improvement in some of its entries.

"I had been using it increasingly and was becoming increasingly aware of it and the possibility of volunteering for the project came to me and I probably thought about it for a year first," he said. "Specifically, information on California mountaineers, and I became aware of the shortcomings of the material on the subject on Wikipedia; some important people's biographies were completely absent and others had major errors, so I started editing those."

A Sierra Club member, Jim Heaphy said he was an active mountain climber in his 20s, with his last major climb being seven years ago. His love of California's mountains and of mountaineering resulted in his knowledge of both, which is how he recognized Wikipedia errors on the subject, he said.

"I got involved to try to repair that weakness in the encyclopedia on that topic, and branched out rather quickly," he said. "I started working on other articles on a lot of different things. I focus on bios a lot but have worked on a wide range of articles over the years."

Heaphy said he has nearly 5,000 pages on a watch list — articles he's paying special attention to, to see if any changes are made.

"If I see something fishy, I look into it, and I can wipe out the edit, taking it back to the state it was in before someone incompetent messed with it," he said. It is editors like the Heaphys that act as quality control for the site, he said.

"Anyone can do it. You see a problem, click the edit button and make the change," Jim Heaphy said. "You don't even need to have an account."

A Bay Area native, Debra Heaphy said she's been editing Wikipedia since 2012.

"I am not a prolific editor, but I am passionate about the subjects I choose to edit," she said.

A craft enthusiast, her first Wikipedia article was about Amish Dolls (aka Amish Faceless Dolls), which she said she wrote as a way of learning more about it.

"We love books and we have a wide range of interests. However, for some relatively obscure topics it is not always easy to find books to read," she said. "That is where Wikipedia comes in, with the amazing variety of subjects covered within the project. One of the most important requirements for editing articles is that research sources must be reliable. Sometimes finding good sources is easy, other times it's difficult. Putting the pieces together, like a puzzle to become whole, is very satisfying."

It's hard to pick the most interesting thing he's learned, because he learns something interesting almost every day, Jim Heaphy said.

"It's so massive a project; it tries to summarize all of human knowledge, so, I learn things all the time," he said. "For instance – about deleting articles. I'll see something I never heard of before and I'll look into it and if I find it's worthy of including, it will stay. Sometimes I add to it, edit it, or, if someone nominates it for deletion, it will be discussed."

On the other hand, just because an article may be poorly written does not necessarily mean it will be deleted, Heaphy said.

"If I see a crappy article, if I look into it and it looks like a worthwhile subject, I'll make it better; make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, if you will," he said.

An example would be the Wikipedia article on early silent film actress Ramona Remus, he said.

"She was the first person to play Dorothy Gale in an early version of the Wizard of Oz," he said. "And ("Wizard) author) Frank Baum was involved in it. The film was made to accompany a stage show and it traveled around the country around the time of World War I."

Someone who didn't know any of that had nominated the Remus article for deletion, but Heaphy's sleuthing revealed enough interesting material that it was decided to keep it, with the new facts added, he said.